[Stosh]

You’re absolutely correct about the whole “climate change / global warming” crap, but that’s because the emphasis there is political (”consensus”) rather than scientific.

Global climate is actually a really interesting field because it’s so doggone complex - everything from cosmic rays (which operate at the atomic level) to the earth’s albedo (which operates at the scale of the size of continents), as well as dozens of things in between influence global climate and its dynamics. Physicists should be having decades of fun trying to sort out all this stuff, because it’s just so complicated.

But the current debate has been dominated by politics, even in the professional scientific societies, like the American Chemical Society and the American Physical Society.

And that should be the key point - keep the science and the politics as much separated from each other as possible; failing to do so will just destroy what credibility the physical sciences have earned over the past couple of centuries.

And by the way, I’m not one of those folks who think science is the be all and end all of human endeavors; it does what it does exceptionally well, but it has limited value in dealing with most of the most important questions human’s face (like “why are we here?” and “how should we live?”).

[expat2]

I agree with what you say here, and am speaking as a physicist who has published in the field of climatology, in the area of radiation physics. This area, which impinges directly on the CO2 issue is quite tricky.

However, the problem is that the direct, 'bare' effect of CO2 can be calculated, but there is considerable uncertainty in the net effect when feedback effects are included.

The climate modelers assume a large positive feedback, because it suits their purposes, but it could be negative, thereby reducing the effect of CO2 well below the levels assumed by the AGW activists/'scientists'. A small temperature increase can increase the humidity, thereby adding water-vapor effects to the CO2 effect, but the increased humidity can also increase cloud-cover which blocks the sun and thus reduces the effect.

No-one knows whether it is positive or negative, but the best guess IMO is that the feedback is NEGATIVE in the tropics and positive near the poles. This would give a net negative effect since most of the outward IR radiation is coming from the warmest regions of the globe.